Wikipedia talk:Identifying and using primary sources: Difference between revisions
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WhatamIdoing (talk | contribs) →Dictionaries: Problems with your sources |
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There is some disagreement among scholars whether dictionaries are secondary or tertiary sources. Personally I don't see where the disagreement comes from as they are clearly secondary sources. The writers of dictionaries look at word usage across thousands of examples, and for their purposes each of those examples is a primary source. Some of those examples might be secondary or tertiary sources for other uses, but in the way dictionary writers use them they are primary. The only counter-example is when/if dictionary writers look to other dictionaries as a source. That's the only way in which dictionaries can be seen as tertiary. Anyway, as there ''is'' confusion about this we should not be stating flat out that dictionaries are tertiary sources. [[User:Mystylplx|Mystylplx]] ([[User talk:Mystylplx|talk]]) 05:13, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
Here's your list:
* [http://www.jstor.org/pss/395666]—talking solely about a particular use (foreign language acquisition), not the general concept. Even a tertiary source can be made primary by the way you use it.
* [http://www.law.indiana.edu/lawlibrary/research/guides/secondary/index.shtml]—The convention in a single field of study (law) that does not happen to use tertiary classification for anything.
* [http://www.loc.gov/law/help/secondary-rsrcs.php]—Ditto.
* [http://www.nd.edu/~lawlib/students/Citing%20Secondary%20Sources%20&%20Cases.pdf]—Another guide for law students.
* [http://werbach.com/stuff/hlr_note.html]—Yet another source specific to the legal profession.
* [http://www.phillwebb.net/SourcesSecondary.htm]—Another website that doesn't admit that any source could be tertiary.
* [http://wire.rutgers.edu/research_assignments_pri_second.html]—Yet another website that doesn't believe in the existence of tertiary sources.
There were two other links that said that dictionaries could be secondary or tertiary, depending on the circumstances, which is not at all good support for your claim that they are secondary sources, especially compared to the many sources available that say they are exclusively tertiary. What you need to find—and haven't, apparently—is something that (1) deals in a three-part classification system '''and''' (2) defines dictionaries as being secondary (not maybe both secondary and tertiary). [[User:WhatamIdoing|WhatamIdoing]] ([[User talk:WhatamIdoing|talk]]) 19:43, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
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